Over the last few days, it was reported that Indonesia would ban Telegram because of terrorist content being shared on the platform. The ultimatum on Friday had a condition: if Telegram figured out a way to moderate content then it would stay unblocked, and so, Telegram has announced the creation of such a team.

The team will be familiar with Indonesian culture and language so it can more effectively remove terrorist-related content. Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, announced the creation of the team via his official Telegram channel which has over 42,000 subscribers.

In his announcement, he explained that officials at the Ministry of Communication and IT in Indonesia had emailed Telegram a list of public channels with terrorism-related content in Telegram but the list wasn't processed quickly enough. Durov claims that he was unaware of the requests and only realised something was wrong when he heard the country would block the app.

In order to fix the situation, the following steps will be implemented in Indonesia:

All of the reported channels by the Ministry of Communication and IT of Indonesia have been blocked.

Durov will have a direct channel of communication with the ministry, which should allow them to work more efficiently on identifying and blocking terrorist propaganda in future.

Lastly, a dedicated team of moderators with knowledge of the Indonesian language and culture will process reports of terrorist-related content more quickly and accurately.

Overall, this is great news for Indonesian Telegram users who will now no longer see the app get blocked and will hopefully see a decrease in terrorist-related content as well.